Central Park Tower

At 472 meters, Central Park Tower is the tallest residential building in the world, and it wears that title from a sliver of Manhattan’s 57th Street known as Billionaires’ Row. The 98-story supertall was designed by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, the team behind the Burj Khalifa and the Jeddah Tower, with AAI Architects as architect of record. Extell developed it with Shanghai Municipal Investment, and Lendlease built it for a price that landed near $3 billion.

Project Scope

The tower is all condominiums above a retail base, with the residential floors starting high enough to clear the buildings around it and open onto unobstructed views of Central Park. To get there, the structure cantilevers eastward over an adjacent low-rise, a move that let the upper floors stretch their footprint where the air rights allowed. WSP engineered a slender concrete frame stiff enough to keep a 1,550-foot tower from swaying past what residents at the top can tolerate. A glass curtain wall handles the wind and the weather at heights where both get serious.

Why It Matters

Central Park Tower is the high-water mark of the supertall-condo boom that reshaped Midtown’s skyline in the 2010s, the era that turned 57th Street into a row of pencil-thin towers chasing park views and global capital. Whether that model still works is an open question, with luxury absorption slower than the boom years assumed. For another Extell supertall a few blocks away, see 80 West 67th Street. Love the genre or not, the engineering that lets a livable building stand a third of a mile in the air is a real achievement. Central Park Tower is the tallest example we’ve got.

Project Team & Details